Doug, that has nothing to do with yield management. It's seat reservation you are talking about What you may be referring to, is that passengers have made seat reservations with their bookings, but have not checked in yet. at a certain time before departure these seats are released if the passengers fail to show up. naturally airlines will wait until close to departure not to upset people who have made a seat reservation Usually airlines also hold back seats for airports to be able to manage the check in process effectively, seating people together which are not booked together, for unaccompanied minors, elderly, handicapped, etc, etc, and they are blocked until a certain time before departure cheers Szabolcs -----Original Message----- From: Automatic digest processor [mailto:LISTSERV@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Monday, 28 July 2003 16:00 To: Recipients of AIRLINE digests Subject: AIRLINE Digest - 27 Jul 2003 (#2003-14) There is one message totalling 32 lines in this issue. Topics of the day: 1. Seat Release ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 27 Jul 2003 23:47:02 -0400 From: Douglas Schnell <dks28@xxxxxxxxxxx> Subject: Seat Release Question for the yield management gurus.... (since I can think of nobody else who would push these policies). Every flight I've been on in the past year or so seems to have most of the seats "locked" by the airline until about two hours before departure. That is, airline seat selection programs (including the airline's own self-checkin kiosks) show all but a few seats as occupied or otherwise unavailable. When you ask an agent, the answer is always "oh, those seats haven't been released." Real world example: checked into SNA today for a PHX flight. In PHX, I connected to BOS. When I bought the ticket last week (at americawest.com) and when I used the self-service kiosk this morning, only middle seats were available. The woman next to me was also traveling to BOS from SNA and the agent told her "they haven't released the seats on the Boston flight yet. Check with an agent Phoenix to see if something else is available." All well and good, but by the time I got to PHX, the BOS flight was a few minutes from boarding. The flight had already checked in full, so I was in the middle for the 5 hours to Boston. Any particular reason or strategy behind locking the seats? I'm at a loss to find a justification. ------------------------------ End of AIRLINE Digest - 27 Jul 2003 (#2003-14) ********************************************** ____________________________________________________________________ CAUTION - This message may contain privileged and confidential information intended only for the use of the addressee named above. If you are not the intended recipient of this message you are hereby notified that any use, dissemination, distribution or reproduction of this message is prohibited. If you have received this message in error please notify Air New Zealand immediately. Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender and may not necessarily reflect the views of Air New Zealand. _____________________________________________________________________ For more information on the Air New Zealand Group, visit us online at http://www.airnewzealand.com _____________________________________________________________________